It is like a breath of wind which mysteriously penetrates
through both, and communicates itself with the rapidity of an arrow." These
are the words of Kuopho, a Chinese panegyrist on the magnet, who wrote in
the beginning of the fourth century. (Klaproth, 'Lettre a M. A. de Humboldt,
sur l'Invention de la Boussole', 1834, p. 125.)
I observed with astonishment,
p 189
on the woody banks of the Orinoco, in the sports of the natives, that the
excitement of electricity by friction was known to these savage races, who
occupy the very lowest place in the scale of humanity. Children may be seen
to rub the dry, flat, and shining seeds or husks of a trailing plant
(probably a 'Negretia') until they are able to attract threads of cotton and
pieces of bamboo cane. That which thus delights the naked copper-colored
Indian is calculated to awaken in our minds a deep and earnest impression.
What a chasm divides the electric pastime of these savages from the
discovery of a metallic conductor discharging its electric shocks, or a pile
composed of many chemically-decomposing substances, or a light-engendering
magnetic apparatus! In such a chasm lie buried thousands of years that
compost the history of the intellectual development of mankind!
The incessant change or oscillatory motion which we discover in all magnetic
phenomena, whether in those of the inclincation, declination, and intensity
of these forces, according to the hours of the day and the night, and the
seasons and the course of the whole year, leads us to conjecture the
existence of very various and partial systems of electric currents on the
surface of the Earth.
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